African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 1054: Chapter 63: New Agriculture

The innovation in water pump technology in Kapalan City is also a reflection of the recent development in the agricultural sector of East Africa. Of course, water resources are not only crucial for agriculture, but also have a significant impact on cities and navigation.

Kapalan City has relatively low natural rainfall. Without advanced and complete water facilities, it would be impossible to establish a new cotton plantation base in the Bohemia province here.

For example, cotton can also be grown in the eastern part of Bohemia province, where rainfall is abundant, but the quality of the cotton is inferior to that in the western region. Generally, cotton quality in arid or semi-arid regions is comparatively better, and the primary challenge for growing cotton in these areas is the water source.

The most notable example is the Somali cotton planting area, where the water construction has made the Shabelle River and Juba River Basin a world-famous agricultural region.

It is the same in Kapalan City. Its water facilities construction began in the 1980s, saw rapid development in the 1990s, and basically took shape. The completion of such water engineering construction in just over a decade could not have happened without the assistance of Black laborers.

As a relatively young country, East Africa has reached the extreme in the exploitation of Black laborers over the past twenty years. Without their contributions, East Africa’s national agriculture couldn’t have swiftly caught up with other countries.

Even the United States, with its relatively short history, has had a century-long history of modern development. The sacrifices made for East Africa to level the differences with regions like Europe and the US within a few decades are inevitably astronomical numbers.

Upon completing his work, the investigator from Kapalan City’s water authority did not hurry to leave. He was quite interested in the agricultural development of Kosha Town, having regularly dealt with agriculture himself. East Africa’s tremendous changes in agricultural development have been witnessed firsthand by generations there.

Kosha Town was originally developed from a settlement, initially planting only some food crops, including wheat and corn. As agricultural development and national agricultural policies changed in recent years, Kosha Town began extensive planting of cotton and tobacco, among other economic crops.

Especially the scale of cotton planting, which grew from almost zero to city-wide prominence, took only seven years.

During the First Plan period, Kosha Town’s cotton planting area saw the fastest growth. On one hand, it was due to the improvement in water facilities; on the other, it was due to increased mechanization efficiency. Most importantly, it was the policy shift that drove Kosha Town’s agricultural transformation development.

Walking through the fields in Kosha Town, one sees large-scale cotton fields, all sizable and geometrically distributed, divided by canals.

”Tractors in the town are increasing day by day, and farming plans are getting larger to suit this new farming machine mode. Previously, farming mostly relied on livestock,” Tal explained to him.

”Tractor production is on the rise now. Our town’s agricultural machinery station currently has twenty-eight tractors. If we include adjacent settlements, there should be more than forty, all allocated in the latest five years, and equipped with corresponding farming tools.”

The tractors used in Kosha Town are mainly produced by Harare City, while Kapalan City, where Kosha Town is located, is an industrially weaker city within the province, its industry limited to some light industrial fields.

”Agriculture has been continuously adjusted these past years, including merging villages into towns, bringing water, electricity, road building, farmland transformation, etc. The city is also actively building a new fertilizer plant, expected to be in use after next year,” the investigator revealed some information to Mayor Tal.

This is not secretive but is one of Kapalan City’s key industrial projects during the Second Plan period. Additionally, Kapalan City will construct a cotton spinning mill to accommodate its increasingly larger cotton planting area.

Hence, during the Second Plan period, Kapalan City was allocated two modernized factories—a small-scale fertilizer factory and a medium-sized cotton spinning mill—highlighting the difficulty of East Africa’s industrialization at present.

Across over six hundred cities in East Africa during the Second Plan period, resource allocation is pitifully scarce, with some cities lacking even a single modern factory. This situation illustrates the challenges of East Africa’s current industrial development.

However, compared to the First Plan period, East Africa’s Second Plan clearly has more advantages. Although East Africa is at the early stages of industrial development, initial industrialization is inevitably tortuous. Yet, with time, the pace of industrialization will accelerate, particularly since East Africa holds absolute advantages in emerging industries.

”During the Second Plan period, managing to obtain industrial resources is already quite difficult. Even our province is like this; you can imagine the challenges in other regions nationwide. Since the past, East Africa’s development has been remarkable, and though I’m unfamiliar with other areas, take our city as an example: the industrial and agricultural output value has risen over thirty percent compared to before the First Plan period.”

”The pace of development in adjacent towns is also very rapid, especially in agriculture. By the completion of the Second Plan, our city’s agricultural scale will likely increase by more than twice.”

During the Second Plan period, Kapalan City cooperated with provincial government plans to focus on increasing cotton planting area. Currently, Kapalan City’s cotton plantation ranks second in the province. If it doubles, it could become the largest cotton planting base in the province.

The confidence in Kapalan City’s expansion of the cotton planting area lies in water facilities conditions. A decade ago, when Kapalan City’s water facilities were not yet perfect, even if there was a desire to expand cotton planting area, the conditions did not permit it.

Located on the far west of Bohemia province, Kapalan City still has a large amount of usable land; as for labor, though the black population has been rapidly decreasing in recent years, the city’s birth rate is quite high, so there’s no need to worry about labor.

Cotton harvesting requires a large amount of manual labor, as East Africa still lacks mature cotton harvesting technology, which is rather regrettable.

Of course, in the early twentieth century, cotton harvesting posed challenges for all major cotton-growing nations worldwide, and even the western United States had to honestly employ manual approaches. In the past, the American South’s plantations mainly relied on enslaved Blacks to accomplish that work.

Woefully, cotton harvesting in East Africa mainly relies on the cooperation of domestic citizens and Black laborers. However, with the rapid decrease in Black laborers, East Africa urgently needs to develop new farming tools.

It’s not only cotton but also crops like rice and wheat, which have similar requirements. However, due to the complexity of cotton harvesting and higher difficulty, the progress in farming tool development is not very satisfactory.

For rice and wheat mechanized planting, there’s already some promise, but due to the immaturity of the technology, it cannot yet be widely promoted like tractors.

During the Second Plan period, the technological changes in East Africa’s agricultural field primarily increased the production of tractors, pesticides, and fertilizers, as well as further improving farmland water construction.

As for further agricultural development, it mainly remains constrained by technical breakthroughs yet to be made. However, challenges do not mean a lack of achievement.

With East Africa’s educational and industrial advancement, new technologies in East Africa are accelerating in development. Research achievements are significantly increasing, especially during the First Plan period, where numerous new technologies were applied, greatly enhancing East Africa’s industrialization progress. So, during the Second Plan period, the East African Government will further promote the application of new technologies in the agricultural and industrial fields.